Fans gathered outside the Arena before Joel's concert. Click the link in this story to see a slideshow from the concert.

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When you’ve been in the music business as long as Billy Joel has — and this is his 50th year as a professional musician — you’ve earned the right to dig deep into your playbook and play a few hidden gems.

But if you’re a Billy Joel fan and you’ve paid a handsome price for a ticket to his show, you probably wouldn’t draw up a setlist that includes obscurities such as “Sleeping with the Television On,” “Summer, Highland Falls” and “Everybody Loves You Now,” all of which Joel played Wednesday night at Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena.

That’s not to say he didn’t play any of his hits, but of his 13 Top 10 singles, he played just three. No “Just the Way You Are,” no “Tell Her About it,” no “Uptown Girl” or “My Life.”

In a way, though, that was kind of refreshing. It’s not like his set was short (almost two hours), and seldom-heard songs such as “Zanzibar” and “The Entertainer” were sort of like old friends you hadn’t heard from in a couple of decades.

And Joel certainly played a lot of well-known songs. The final run of “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” “Piano Man,” “Big Shot,” “It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll to Me” and “Only the Good Die Young” didn’t leave anyone disappointed.

He plays with a crack band, particularly sax man Mark Rivera, who has been playing with Joel since 1982 and knows how to spice up a song, whether it’s a wailing solo on “Italian Restaurant” or just adding sweet touches to “New York State of Mind.”

Joel has been such a prolific hitmaker for such a long time that it’s easy to forget just what a good piano player he is. Then, on “River of Dreams,” he tears through a blistering solo that reminds you that they don’t call him the Piano Man just because he wrote a song of that name.

He did have a tendency Wednesday night to inexplicably wander off into the second half of Derek & the Dominoes’ “Layla” (“I didn’t write that one,” he told the audience the first of three or four times he did it throughout the course of the show. “But I wish like hell I did.”)

He was also pretty chatty from the stage, whether talking about his long history of playing shows in Jacksonville (“You used to have that paper mill here. We knew we were close before we even got here.”) or the next stop on his tour, in New York (“It’s Siberia up there.”)

But I suppose when you’ve been in the spotlight for going on half a century, that’s not much to quarrel about.

Setlist

1. “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)”2. “Pressure”3. “Everybody Loves You Now”4. “Your Song” (snippet)5. “Summer, Highland Falls”6. “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)”7. “Zanzibar”8. “Where’s the Orchestra?”9. “Allentown”10. “New York State of Mind”11. “Sleeping with the Television On”12. “The Entertainer”13. “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” (snippet)14. “Always a Woman”15. “Don’t Ask Me Why”16. “River of Dreams”17, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”18. “Piano Man”19. “Big Shot”20. “It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll to Me”21. “You May Be Right”22. “Only the Good Die Young”

Yes indeed; "deep into his playbook", with understandable lyrics about love and life, and well-written music. I would have liked to have told him though, that after watching the Weather Channel, I am not in a "New York State of Mind". At least not until opening day.